PLUTO's Power Conditioning and Distribution Unit (PCDU)

• PCDUs similar between satellites
• Custom hardware/firmware
• Snippet based hardware design: design PCDUs from snippets, not individual components
• Problem: firmware development from scratch
  → laborious, hardware/firmware inconsistencies

Example ADC Snippet

• Idea: generate firmware based on data in schematics
• Simple example: pindefinition.h
• Many details in schematic irrelevant
  → abstract to Group
• Group similar to Snippet but for firmware generation

Example Group Netlist

• Abstraction of entire schematics: what Groups are there, how do they interconnect
• Tool agnostic
• Firmware language agnostic

KiCad Annotations

kicad_firmware_generation

• Schematic annotations define Groups
• Very easy with reused snippets
• Open-Source: github.com/DLR-RY/kicad_firmware_generation

kicad_firmware_generation

• Idea: a Jinja2 template for each Group Type
• Generate firmware from Group Netlist and Jinja2 templates
• Key advantage: fully deterministic
  → suitable for CI-pipeline
• Successfully integrated into PLUTO's PCDU development
• Found hardware fault in PCDU

Systematic Fault Injection

• Inject faults into PCDU schematics:
  swap labels, delete cables
• 8885 unique faults
• Result: detected up to 75% of otherwise not found Group Pin swaps
• Also: benchmark shows generation runtime below 1sec

Synthetic Benchmark

Group Netlist

kicad_firmware_generation

github.com/DLR-RY/kicad_firmware_generation